Talk by Silvia Schäfer, Monday 10th 4-6 pm

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are very happy to announce the last talk of this semester’s Syntax Colloquium, which will take place on Monday, February 10, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Silvia Schäfer will talk about „The variation of participle agreement in four Veneto dialects“. Abstract: In my research project, I deal with the (apparently) optional participle agreement in VS structures of four Veneto varieties (Italy). I conducted fieldwork in which I tested whether the nature of the postverbal DP affects the preferably produced and accepted participle agreement. In this talk, I will present my fieldwork, including research questions, methodology and the first quantitative results. I will outline the deducible generalisations and raise the controverse question of variation in generative syntax.   You are cordially invited!...
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TALK BY NELE OTS – WEDNESDAY 5TH 4-6PM

by Tina Bögel Comment Closed
We are happy to announce the next talk in the phonology colloquium by Nele Ots, which was cancelled last year - Abstract below:   05.02.2020 Nele Ots (GU): "Conceptual and linguistic influences on sentence intonation: evidence from English and Estonian languages" Time: 16-18 Room: IG 4.301   Everybody is welcome!   Abstract: The study investigates how early phrasal F0 is planned in experimentally controlled but spontaneous utterances. Phonetic evidence indicates speakers preplan F0 declination (e.g., Yuan and Liberman, 2014). The phonetic F0 data was combined with eye movements to explore how well F0 of phrase-initial energy peaks (also F0 declination) relates to conceptual and phonological levels of planning in two typologically different languages - English and Estonian. Speakers described pictures of simple events with sentences of varying length (e.g., The girl is hanging the pink shirt/ the shirt with ladybirds vs. The girl is hanging a shirt). Importantly, the results showed that speech onset delays and F0 peaks were both affected by the length of the last-mentioned noun phrases (patient...
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Talk by Frank Sode – Thursday 6th 4-6 pm

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Frank Sode (Goethe Universität). Please find an abstract below. Title: The syntax and semantics of suppletive "wenn"-clauses: Evidence from V2 Room: IG 4.301 Date: February 6th Time: 4pm - 6pm Abstract: As Williams (1974) observed, the sentence in (1-a) can have a reading that can be paraphrased as in (1-b). (1) a. I would be happy if Bill were here.      b. I would be happy that Bill was here, if he were. Pesetsky (1991) argues that Williams' paraphrase is "more than a mere paraphrase". According to Pesetsky (1991), something like (1-b) is an actual syntactic representation of (1-a) at some level of the derivation. It is well-known that V2-clauses in German can alternate with suppletive "wenn"-clauses in construction with preference predicates, see for example Frank (1998), Meinunger (2004), Meinunger (2007). (2) a. Es ist besser, wenn du kommst.           It is better if you come       b. Es ist besser, du kommst.           It is better you come       Both: 'It is...
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